Pilgrim Hall Museum

America's oldest continuously operating public museum, founded in 1824. The collection includes possessions of the Mayflower Pilgrims, including the only portrait of a Mayflower passenger painted from life and items recovered from the original settlement.

Pilgrim Hall Museum at 75 Court Street in Plymouth is the oldest continuously operating public museum in the United States, founded in 1824 by the Pilgrim Society four years after it was established to preserve the memory of the Mayflower settlers. Designed by architect Alexander Parris in austere Quincy granite, the building houses the world's most significant collection of Plymouth Colony artifacts, including objects that crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower itself. Among its most prized possessions are the Brewster Chair, believed to have belonged to Elder William Brewster; a 1651 portrait of Edward Winslow, the only known painting of a Pilgrim made from life; and the remains of the Sparrow Hawk, a seventeenth-century vessel that wrecked off Cape Cod in 1626 and lay buried beneath the sand until storms uncovered the hull in May 1863. It is these artifacts -- many carrying four centuries of history and human attachment -- that some believe have drawn restless spirits to the museum's galleries.

The museum sits in a town built on tremendous suffering. During the brutal first winter of 1620-1621, forty-five of the one hundred and two Mayflower passengers perished from disease, exposure, and starvation. At the worst point, only seven colonists were healthy enough to care for the others. The dead were buried on nearby Cole's Hill under cover of darkness so that the Wampanoag would not realize how vulnerable the colony had become. When an eighteenth-century storm eroded the hillside, skeletal remains washed into Plymouth Harbor, and the bones were not properly reinterred until 1921, when they were placed in a granite sarcophagus on the hill. Visitors to Cole's Hill today report hearing the sounds of voices emanating from inside the cold stone walls of the crypt.

Staff and visitors at Pilgrim Hall Museum have long reported subtle but persistent paranormal activity, particularly around artifacts with the strongest connections to their original owners. Objects in display cases appear to shift position slightly between visits, and some visitors describe an overwhelming feeling of being watched while viewing the Pilgrim possessions, as though the settlers' spirits remain attached to the belongings that accompanied them across the Atlantic. The museum's proximity to Burial Hill -- one of America's oldest cemeteries, in continuous use since the 1620s and containing the remains of over 2,500 people including Governor William Bradford and William and Mary Brewster -- adds to the concentration of spiritual energy in the area. Visitors to Burial Hill report full-body apparitions, disappearing silhouettes, and screams echoing among the headstones. One visitor described a white silhouette lunging at her face and screaming for her to leave. Another reported seeing a towering figure in deerskin clothing with no eyes.

Plymouth's museum community more broadly has documented significant paranormal activity. At the Trask House on North Street, curator Jan Williams has reported regular encounters including disembodied moans and groans, spectral footsteps, and museum doors slamming shut with such force that the walls shake. Williams attributes the activity to individuals who "died very young, very suddenly, and a lot of them have unfinished business." The Travel Channel's Portals to Hell investigated the nearby Spooner House, built in 1749, where the ghost of Nathaniel Spooner reportedly haunts the bedroom where he died from an infection following an amputation, and a child spirit named Abigail -- who died from an abscessed tooth -- appears in windows wearing a white dress before vanishing. At the Mayflower Society House, visitors describe hearing a large organ playing in the library when no one is present.

Pilgrim Hall Museum's own atmosphere grows most unsettling during evening events and after-hours maintenance, when the galleries empty of daytime visitors and the four-hundred-year-old artifacts sit in silence. Plymouth's Dead of Night Ghost Tours and US Ghost Adventures both include the museum district in their routes, citing the concentration of colonial-era death and preserved personal belongings as a nexus for paranormal activity in what they call "America's haunted hometown."